Food Coloring Faux Pas

Last year I had a craft with food coloring. At storytime we made marshmallow snowmen and decorated their faces with black food coloring. All was going well with this cute, sugary snowmen and the kids really enjoyed it. Then came the teens. Later that afternoon I had some supplies left over for teens to make snowmen, big mistake. The three year olds could handle the food coloring but with the teens the food coloring promptly was spilled all over the carpet. Black food coloring does not come out of carpet.

So I decided to use food coloring again in a storytime craft. You take food coloring and put dots of it on paper, fold the paper over and then get a colorful Rorschach design. It was for our 'Colors' storytime and the kids really liked it. I wasn't thinking and I didn't put anything down underneath the paper, I thought the food coloring would easily come out of the table. Turns out I was right, with the exception of pink food coloring. For some reason every color comes out of tabletops except for bright pink colors. Now there are little pink droplets on the tables. You think I would have learned my lesson the first time. The allure of food coloring was just too much.

Gorilla in the Room

Last week our children's computer was stolen. Someone simply walked through the door, unhooked the computer from the monitor and idly sauntered out the front door. Our security cameras were not aimed at the children's computers and no one on the staff remembers seeing anyone walking out with a computer.

I believe that we at the library get so used to people walking in and out of the door, carrying things, talking, asking for things etc that it would be simple if someone acted casual and simply walked out of the door like he owned the computer. Patrons would simply think he was a tech person and ignore the situation. Society gets so used to ignoring the scene around them that it takes some highly unusual disturbance to shake them out of their day to day goings on. And sometimes even that is not enough...

I heard on a talk show that people are so oblivious to the world around them that when they did a test with random subjects and put a gorilla in a normal room full of everyday things ten percent of people did not notice the gorilla. The speaker on the show said these ten percent are those that do not survive disasters.